It seems to me the scientific community should divide evolution into two components:

1.) The Theory of Evolutionary Origin
2.) The Process of Evolution through Natural Selection

That way, the “Process of Evolution” can be treated like the “process of photosynthesis” or the “process of nuclear fusion”. There is nothing theoretical about evolution and it is critical to get the “theory” out of the mind of an ignorant public.

People can then argue till their blue in the face over the very origin of life itself: pitting the “Theory of Evolutionary Origin” against the “Theory of Intelligent Design”. The “Theory of Evolutionary Origin” would suggest life first started by an evolutionary process of recombinant proteins. As this is a question we can never answer (not knowing if Earth was seeded by microbes from Mars, from some alien civilization, or by the chance of lightning striking the gasses of the ancient Earth – who knows – who was there?) we can relegate this to the other religious questions that seek to somehow definitively answer all the great unknowns our minds are simply not capable of understanding in the first place. That would separate the fact of evolution from the religious debate that basically pits the entirety of the observable natural world against a few sentences in the bible, and free everyone to get on with a more focused and reasonable debate.